1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile terminal, and in particular, to a mode switching method for a mobile terminal capable of switching an operation mode according to an orientation (i.e., posture or placement attitude) of the mobile terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, a mobile phone provides various menu screens through a display user interface in order to allow mobile phone user's to conveniently select various mobile phone functions and options.
Today, as the integration of various mobile phone functions has increased, the depth of the hierarchical menus of a mobile phone has also increased, which in turn has produced greater overall user-convenience when a user executes a given tasks.
For example, today's mobile phones typically integrate several functions together such as alarm setting, time and date scheduling, audio filter playback, camera/photo, and digital multimedia broadcast reception functions.
In this case, assuming that an audio playback function is a sub-function of a multimedia function, generally, a user must select a multimedia function menu to reach an audio playback menu. However, such an increase of key manipulation complexity for executing a specific function can substantially limit the user's overall usability of other useful mobile phone functions.